Urmadic University

A group of design experts and students got together in 2011 to discuss the idea of setting up the ‘Urmadic University’- a university without borders designed to address some of the major challenges facing society. Design expert Professor Tony Fry updates us on the progress of the initiative.

Transcript

Antony Funnell: And our final catch-up for today involves Professor Tony Fry from Griffith University in Brisbane. Almost a year ago we spoke with Dr Fry about his plans to develop what he calls an Urmadic University, basically a network of academics, specialists and thinkers not tied to one particular campus, but sharing their ideas to solve some of the world's pressing problems.

The concept is a challenge to the current location-based, industry specific approach taken by many tertiary institutions. So, 12 months on, let's get an update.

Tony Fry: The purpose of the Urmadic University is pretty simple, it is to actually deal with the failures of the universities that currently exist because the current universities are more or less just serving the status quo, it isn't really responding to the challenges of the future. So the Urmadic University is actually presenting the existing university with that possibility.

Antony Funnell: And in that sense the initiative is focused on the problem, isn't it, it is not focused on the academic institution or bringing people together in an academic institution to deal with problems, it's focused on going to the problem and bringing the people to the problem. Is that correct?

Tony Fry: Exactly. We're facing huge problems, and they are all connected. We tend to think about the problems as if they were separate, but if you bring together food, population, climate change, just to take three, those three problems are all one problem, and they all have specific contexts in particular places. And the way that we need to deal with those problems is to actually learn by going to those places and actually dealing with them, not just technically, not just scientifically, but socially and culturally as well.

Antony Funnell: You kicked off the Urmadic University initiative last year with a hothouse that we covered on this program that was held in Brisbane. This year you've held another one in Paris, and in line with that idea of going to the problem, you're looking at various places where you can actually start doing demonstration models I guess of how you would tackle these problems.

Tony Fry: Yes, we met in Paris, we were trying to build the constituency. We had people from 10 different countries attending. But we decided we weren't just going to go on having a talk, we wanted to show people what we do by doing it. So we're starting out next year probably going to Slovenia, one of the countries in the world that is having major economic problems, so how do you start to, on the ground, imagine and create another kind of economy? Slovenia is interesting because it has just gone through this transition from communism to capitalism and it's disillusioned with both. So there's a conversation, but it's not based upon us going with expertise, parachuting into the place, but rather we've made contact with people in Slovenia. So it's a dialogue where we identify and explore the problems with them.

Antony Funnell: What attracted us at Future Tense to the Urmadic University idea in the first place was its complexity. It is a difficult thing to get your head around because it's a different way of looking at what university is and should be, how it should function. But yet you and the initiative are still connected to Griffith University here in Brisbane, Australia. How do you manage that, how do you explain the concept of the Urmadic University and that connection to a brick and mortar university in Griffith?

Tony Fry: Well, first of all we have to put it in the context of time. The project of the Urmadic University isn't a project of a few months or a few years or even a few decades, it is participating in the revitalisation of the existing university in the same way that the modern university is a product of the revitalisation of the original mediaeval university by the taking in of new thinking around reason.

So we're beginning a process that we will never see the end of. The current university, the modern university is in many ways coming towards the end of its life. At the same time, it is not going away. The Urmadic University is one of those projects amongst many now in the world that are committed to bringing new ways of learning in relation to pressing contemporary problems into a more dynamic relation with the existing university. So there isn't really a contradiction.

Antony Funnell: You're somebody who talks a lot about the future, you're someone who is very future focused. How difficult is it getting people to understand the concept of the future, to understand how complex just that basic idea can be and what it actually entails? Because it seems to me we often think of the future almost as though it's a blank slate, as though it is a destination we're heading to, but that's not correct, is it.

Tony Fry: No. To understand the significance of the future we have to be able to put ourselves back into time, we have to realise that we've been around as a species, Homo sapiens, for 150,000 years, we've been settled in the forms of life that we now enjoy as they developed for around about 10,000 years. So for 150,000 years, more or less, we were nomadic. So that really tells us that the way of life that we have now isn't necessarily going to be the way of life that we are going to have in the future.

We can't go on existing as we are and we can't go on really perpetuating the status quo. Likewise, we come and go back to what we were. So on the one hand we've got to make another future for ourselves but, as you say, we're not dealing with a blank slate. The future is already filled by a huge number of things that we've thrown into it, it's heavily populated. The second thing is our future as a species is not assured, partly because of what we've thrown into the future.

So we are in a situation where unless we learn to occupy the planet in another way, we really don't have a very long future in terms of the length of time that we've existed in the past. So the future has to be on the agenda in a far more significant, long-term way than it currently does. People talk about a few generations, we need to talk about 50 or 100 generations. So the big agenda item in relation to the future is how we learn to change.

Antony Funnell: Tony Fry, it's always interesting talking to you, thank you very much for the update.